Historiography of the Web

The World Wide Web, as distinct from the Internet within which it was constructed, is now over ten years old. This would hardly seem old enough to make it a subject of history, regardless of the fact that quite a few "histories" of its development have been written. Yet in terms of the conceits of technological change and innovation, ten years is considered quite a few generations. If measured in terms of the amount of writing that has been generated about the web and its impact on society, the field is as broad as many in historical study.

That writing, like the technical construction of the web itself, is not organized heirarchically. There are many approaches, many avenues, many intersections. A few of the themes that one can trace<>

• <>historians:
  
• simple, been there done that: history and computing, ain't this all nifty keen
  <>
• <>teaching: evolution, enabling, communication, JAHC
  
• <>resource creation, recovery/digitization: digital collections, IATH, ACH, 
• models: library, communication (democratizing or not), blogs, :
  
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• old wine (search for, resistance to) new bottles: Nines, non-academic history/historians, blogs
  

• postmodernity, critical theory, hypertext: Landow, Joyce, invoking/reflecting the big one: Foucault, Derrida, Barthes
  
• identity, cyborg, MUDs/MOOs: Turkle, Harraway

Meta models: Or all of the above in a "how do we model the web/how is the web modeled?" and of course, who is "we" (a chronology? describing the elephant?)

or

Some current trends that may intersect in interesting ways in how we "do" history:
- "information explosion" - a perception (and an increasing reality?) that the amount of collected data is too overwhelming to process by traditional means
- instant information - that the web has or will have "everything"
- instant communication - person-to-person or person to fluid groups (subcategory: polarization)
- the tyranny of "I" - everything revolves around the individual (and "I feel")
- the impact of video (especially post-70s quick cutting TV) on human brain development (cf. recent studies on connection between under age 2 TV viewing and ADHD)
- the refinement of marketing techniques, esp. its role in politics and now a new collaboration between marketing agencies, Proctor & Gamble, etc.
- the changing role, nature, and process of education (esp. "the disciplines", the rise of part-timers, and of course, online learning)